America's Religious Past Fades in a Secular Age

Unthinkable to the Founders: One in five Americans today has no religious affiliation.

By DAVID AIKMAN

A hypothetical Martian with a deep interest in America's political and cultural history would be surprised and perhaps amused at the religious composition of those running in the current presidential campaign.

The incumbent president is an adult convert to Christianity after being raised by a mother he has described as agnostic but interested in many faiths. His opponent is a Mormon, a faith tradition entirely indigenous to America and less than two centuries old. As for the two vice-presidential candidates, both are Catholic. This is the first presidential election in American history in which neither of the two presidential candidates or vice-presidential candidates was brought up as a Protestant.

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, American Protestants recently became a minority of the country (48%) for the first time—not just since the American Revolution, but since the establishment of the first English colonies on American soil. Even more notably, the same Pew research revealed that 20% of all Americans now say they are not affiliated with any religion.

At one level, this is a victory for religious pluralism—or, to use the politically correct term, diversity. At another, when one in five Americans has no religious affiliation, it is a commentary on the diminished importance of the moral underpinnings that characterized the United States for most of its existence.

At the country's founding, even skeptics and Deists like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin paid great respect to the morality and values that the vast majority of Americans accepted as God-given standards by which to live. These were standards rooted in Christian belief and teachings. Jefferson, as is well known, was a man of the Enlightenment who was genuinely skeptical about the supernatural claims of Christianity. Even he, however, believed in the need for virtue in national life as an essential ingredient for the safe continuation of the republic.

The Founders shared a conviction about the necessity for national virtue, and most equated this directly with Christianity. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) said that Christianity was "the strong ground of republicanism. Many of its concepts have for their objects republican liberty and equality, as well as simplicity, integrity and economy in government."

Happily for all of us since then, the Founders rejected the folly of the state's promoting any denominational brand of Christianity. After much early and often noisy opposition from Protestants at the popular level, Catholics came first to be tolerated and then eventually to be welcomed into the national tapestry of faiths. Just as the leaven of the Gospel message of love pricked Protestant Christian consciences to accept Catholics, so did the Gospel's message move Americans to address, and at last erase, the wicked national stain of slavery.

Meanwhile, at the popular level, individual lives were being changed and entire communities swept clean of corruption and squalor through the phenomenal social effect of the Second Great Awakening (from approximately 1800 to 1850), a Christian revival movement that swept the country. A teacher traveling through Kentucky in 1802 at the height of the revivals there reported that "it was the most moral place" he had ever visited. In South Carolina, after similar revivals, he observed: "Drunkards have become more sober and orderly—bruisers, bullies and blackguards meek, inoffensive, and peaceable."

It is hard to believe today, when a secular orthodoxy clanks its way peevishly through academe, the media and popular culture, that it was broadly accepted by most Americans throughout the 19th century that America was at heart Christian—not in any formal or legal sense, but in the values and morality that most people wanted to observe.

The German-trained historian George Bancroft, in his magisterial "History of the United States of America," said that he thought America was a Christian nation established and sustained by God for the purpose of spreading liberty and democracy in the world, an idea that lies at the heart of American exceptionalism. In fact, the belief that America was called by God to be "a new Israel" and a blessing to the world goes right back to the Puritan preacher John Winthrop. In his famous shipboard sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," on the Arabella in 1631, Winthrop made the much-quoted statement about America: "We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."

The eyes of all are still upon America, but it is a markedly different place. As the secularization of that city upon a hill continues, it is not hard to imagine a presidential race one day that involves candidates who practice no religion at all.

Mr. Aikman, a former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, is the author of "One Nation Without God: The Battle for Christianity in an Age of Unbelief" (Baker Books, 2012).

A version of this article appeared October 26, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: America's Religious Past Fades in a Secular Age.

October 23, 2012, 12:30 pm

And God Spoke to Abraham (Lincoln)

By EDWARD J. BLUM and PAUL HARVEY

In early October 1862, Abraham Lincoln received a letter from God.

"I am your Heavenly Father and the God of all Nations," it began. God had particular explanations and instructions for the president, whose entire term of office had been defined by war. "I am the cause for the disruption between the North and the South," he continued, and the point was to destroy the "horrible state of affairs" that man's "selfish nature" had brought. "I am not partial and have no respect of persons." Coming just weeks after the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the letter made it clear that God wanted to destroy slavery. For further instructions, God told Lincoln to gather six of his best men and meet in person "my instrument the Messenger of Peace the Christ of this day."

Conveniently, the "Christ of this day" was not only staying in Washington, but lived just a few miles from the White House, at 476 Pennsylvania Avenue. At the meeting and through the medium, God would explain "what to do that will speedily terminate this Devilish war."

Lincoln did not believe the letter was from God, of course; as he suspected, it came from a local religious devotee named Lydia Smith, who believed herself to be God's medium. For Lincoln, this kind of supernatural penetration was lunacy, not prophecy. He didn't believe that God walked the earth, inserting himself into the affairs of men. He told one group of ministers who had earlier pressed him for emancipation that these were not "the days of miracles," and that "I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation."

Yet for as much as Lincoln disclaimed the possibilities of "direct revelation," writers to him thought otherwise. This was, after all, the mid-19th century, when religious fervor ran deep in the country's psyche, not to mention the middle of the Civil War. The possibility of overturning slavery had so fired spiritual sentiments across the North that self-proclaimed mediums and prophets believed that God was on the move in the nation. Throughout the war, and especially when it came to emancipation, people sent the president missives on what God was doing, where Jesus was and how the sacred could win the war for the Union.

Perhaps the most interesting spiritual letter Lincoln received was from a man named George F. Kelly. A month after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, Kelly warned the president that he was "surrounded by Spies and men of evil intentions." Perhaps, he wrote, Lincoln wondered now "if God has forsaken us." But, Kelly insisted, this was not the case. Instead, God had further demands for the president.

Kelly, claiming to be channeling God, called on the president to "adopt the plans called, Radical," which would emancipate the slaves and bring full racial equality to the nation. "I have Seen in visions," Kelly went on. The son of God, he reported, had returned and was ready to lead Lincoln's military to overthrow the South. "Have not the honest hearted been longing for the Second 'Jesus' to Save this nation and the world," Kelly asked, and then answered, "Have ye not heard that in one of the New England States 'God has raised him up in humble life'?" Did he not, Kelly asked, "do even So with His former Servant; who toiled with the people more than thirty years?" Kelly's prophetic vision concluded that in two weeks, Jesus would reveal himself and win the war for the Union.

Although Lincoln considered Kelly a "Crazy Man," as the president wrote on one envelope from him, the letter was telling. In the midst of a war where white men were killing white men in epic numbers over, in part, the institution of slavery, Kelly now envisioned Jesus to be a New Englander who would fight to free the black captives. In Kelly's eyes, Jesus looked and sounded awfully similar to John Brown. The man who had been executed for treason only a few years earlier, but who had fired spiritual sentiments himself with comparisons to Christ, seemed to be reincarnated and ready to fight.

There were other letters Lincoln received from other spiritual guides, and there were other claims about Christ's power in America at the time. Some demanded money, as was the case where one writer requested half a billion dollars to "Reveale, Christ, Jesus."

At first glance, such letters, and the millenarian spirituality they articulated, sound like vestiges of the culture modern men and women left behind. We would expect talk of revelations and prophecies from colonial Puritans, who executed one another with threats of witchcraft. But the mid-19th century was hardly the modern secular society we sometimes imagine it to be. Firsthand encounters with the sacred were commonplace claims by even respected, "modern" Americans.

Lincoln may have considered George Kelly and the others "crazy" for their visions, but their experiences were little different from those of the abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth, who met with Lincoln in October 1864 and bonded with him over one of his favorite Bibles. Years earlier, Truth believed that God spoke to her. According to one of Truth's friends, she said that "God revealed himself to her, with all the suddenness of flash of lightning."

Experiences like this one led Truth to join the growing Millerite movement of the 1830s, which followed the biblical calculus of William Miller toward the conclusion that Jesus was going to return in the early 1840s. When the Second Coming failed to materialize in 1844, the "Great Disappointment" left many confused. But Truth continued to believe that God and Christ could and would intervene in this world; when her fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke despairingly about the chances for justice, she interrupted him with a rebuke in the form of a question, "Frederick, is God dead?"

There was no disappointment for Joseph Smith, for whom Jesus and God were very much alive. He met with them in upstate New York around the same time Sojourner Truth was earning her freedom, and Smith's "first vision" became a central element of Mormon theology and belief. Indeed, the notion that God still intervened in this world was critical to the emergence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and during the Civil War, many Mormons believed that the carnage was evidence of Smith's prophetic powers. In 1832, he had prophesied that "war will be poured out." It would begin with South Carolina and envelop the entire nation. "For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States." Nat Turner's spirit would take over, and "after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war." At the time of Lincoln's election, one Mormon diarist wrote excitedly, "The south is angry; the North is no better and from what I can see they are both hastening to fulfill the Prophecy of Joseph Smith Jr."

If we broaden our scope even further, we see that during the Civil War, more and more Northerners were searching for God's voice amid the chaos and carnage. Almost as quickly as the war began, some Northerners were pushing for the phrase "In God We Trust" to be placed on coinage. In 1864, a group of Protestant clergy formed the National Reform Association to petition Lincoln and Congress to amend the Constitution to acknowledge "Almighty God" and "the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among nations."

Perhaps most famously, Julia Ward Howe imagined the spirit of Christ (who was "born across the sea") inspiring soldiers in this country. "As he died to make men holy," the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" versed, "let us die to make men free." In the decades after the war and into the 20th century, the song became a staple of American religious culture. Its most famous vocalists, in fact, have been the members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

And of course, by the war's end it was Abraham Lincoln himself who was ruminating on the spiritual meaning of the war and slavery, almost as much as the prophets and mediums who had previously written to him. During his now famous Second Inaugural on March 4, 1865, Lincoln made public his private wonders about what God was doing. He asked his audience, what caused the war? What were God's purposes for the future? Lincoln was uncertain on much of it, but he knew this: slavery was somehow the cause of the war; God hates injustice; and the nation must now bring "charity" and "right" to heal the land. Beyond that, he concluded, "The Almighty has His own purposes."

When Lincoln invoked the Almighty during his Second Inaugural, he tapped into the widespread sense in the North that something spiritual was happening during the war. For as much as he differed from people like George Kelly and Lydia Smith, he shared with them the focus on trying to discern what God had in store for the land. Some believed that the events of the war were so momentous that they were themselves evidence of the work of Jesus and God on earth. Others hoped that by invoking the sacred - either through song or in the Constitution - they could gain the Almighty's favor or empower men to continue to fight.

The songs, the letters, the prophecies, the experiences spoke to another layer of how deeply the Civil War and emancipation touched hearts, minds, and spirits of Americans in the North. Deluged in blood, but hopeful for a peaceful nation shorn of enslavement, these mystics, mediums, prophets, politicians, writers and clergy believed that the events of 150 years ago had ushered in God's intervention. They demonstrate most clearly how war changes people not only in body, but in soul, too.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

Edward J. Blum, a historian at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, are the co-authors of "The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America."

Dino Brugioni’s bird’s-eye view of Cuban missile crisis By Dan Zak, Updated: Thursday, October 18, 2:30 PM Fifty years ago Monday afternoon, Dino A. Brugioni was peering through a microstereoscope at black-and-white aerial photographs of Cuba. Outside his grimy, nondescript office building at Fifth and K streets NW, it was an ideal autumn day. The leaves had begun to turn. Washington was debating the merits of the Redskins, who had tied the St. Louis Cardinals on the road the day before. And about 1,000 nautical miles south, the Soviets were readying medium-range ballistic missiles in the Sierra del Rosario, west-southwest of Havana. Washington was in range.

In the National Photographic Interpretation Center, Brugioni, his fellow photo interpreter Vincent DiRenzo and the center’s silver-haired director, Arthur C. Lundahl, absorbed the weight of the evidence before them. The room was still.

“I think I know what you guys think they are,” Lundahl said finally, referring to the small alien shapes in the photos, “and if I think they are the same thing and we both are right, we are sitting on the biggest story of our time.”

On Tuesday — 50 years and one day later — Brugioni, 90, sits at the kitchen table in his ranch-style home in Hartwood, Va., northwest of Fredericksburg. Before him, on the table, is a stack of enlarged photos, some of which he used to make three 20-by-22-inch briefing boards for President John F. Kennedy. The boards illustrated, simply and definitely, that the Soviets were positioning offensive missiles in Cuba.

And off went the Cuban missile crisis.

Outside Brugioni’s kitchen window, blue jays zip between orange-leafed trees on his grassy acreage. Fifty years ago could be yesterday.

“I had a cot next to my desk,” Brugioni says, a hint of his native Missouri in his strong voice. “And I was answering phones, but I also got down on my knees and prayed.”

Bombing missions

His journey to that moment began decades earlier at a dairy in Jefferson City, Mo., where he worked for 10 cents an hour and saved $8 to buy his first camera. His grandfather had emigrated from Italy to work in coal mines; his father followed suit but wanted his sons to pursue above-ground careers. Brugioni went to college and enlisted in the Army Air Corps when World War II started. He flew 66 bombing missions and about 15 reconnaissance missions all across Europe, lying on his stomach in a B-25 at 5,000 feet, snapping photos of enemy troops.

“Only in America could an Italian coal miner’s son be given that kind of a privilege,” he says.

After the war, Brugioni couriered for the Tennessee Valley Authority to pay his way toward an international economics degree at George Washington University. He met his wife, Theresa, while on an errand at the Library of Congress, where she worked in the photo-duplication department. The first time he saw her, she was decorating an office Christmas tree. Her legs were at eye level, as he tells it, and that was that.

Brugioni joined the intelligence community in 1948, became an expert on Soviet industrial installations and, in 1955, a founding member of what would become the National Photographic Interpretation Center, which provided the intelligence community with visual analyses of foreign military installations, among other scenes. A sign fixed to the wall of the Fifth-and-K office outlined the mission in this new age of nuclear armament and electronic innovation: “Anticipate all problems prior to their occurrence.”

Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, using aerial photography gathered by the new U-2 aircraft, the NPIC team debunked the notion that the Soviet Union had outpaced the United States in bomber production. Brugioni and fellow interpreters divined crucial information from the abstract geometry of photos taken from high altitudes (for example, roads with wider turns indicated the transport of longer missiles).

“Everything that man does on the face of the Earth creates a pattern,” Brugioni says, sitting at his kitchen table with a visitor. “Let me give you an example. Let me try you out as a photo interpreter. You’re photographing every Russian secret installation every third day, around the clock. We’re looking at a group of buildings, and we want to know which one is the headquarters. You determine it in the winter. How?”

The amount of footsteps in the snow?

“You’re getting close,” he says. “The headquarters is the first building to be cleared of snow.”

‘A holy miracle’

When U-2s started photographing Soviet activity in Cuba, NPIC’s skill set proved to be “a holy miracle,” as intelligence pioneer Sherman Kent called the data gathered from the flights. Fifty years ago this week, interpreters were scouring photos and extracting intelligence that signaled the potential for nuclear armageddon. Every higher-ranked official up to Kennedy asked the team, “Are you sure?”

They were. Daily photo reconnaissance and interpretation — accomplished in tense, 12-hour shifts comparing thousands of feet of film — steered the crisis during its 13 dire days. The teamwork at NPIC forced and empowered U.S. officials to make crucial decisions that readied the nation for (and perhaps spared it from) catastrophe. The darkest day was Oct. 27, 1962, when negotiations between Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were at a boiling point, when analysts determined that the missile sites were fully operational, when the military had elevated its readiness to DEFCON 2.

Brugioni called his wife — who always left dinner out for him, who never complained about her husband’s long hours of secret work — to tell her to be ready to jump in the car and head for Missouri.

The next morning, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missiles in Cuba in exchange for Kennedy’s pledge to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. The world exhaled. Brugioni retired from NPIC in 1981, wrote an account of the crisis titled “Eyeball to Eyeball” in 1990, was a CIA consultant until 1998 and published articles on the intelligence and environmental uses of aerial and spatial imagery (which, in recent years, has been used to guide the response to natural disasters and to help verify the location of Osama bin Laden’s residence).

Sometimes the problems of the world — and the solutions to them — are visible only by studying patterns from high above.

‘Insight of an artist’

Brugioni has the ability “to explain complicated technical procedures to ordinary people and to policy makers,” says Michael Dobbs, a former Washington Post reporter and author of three books on the Cold War. “The first pictures were taken at 70,000 feet and were rather obscure. They meant something to the intelligence people but not the policy maker necessarily. . . . To be a good interpreter, you need to be an expert but you also need to have flashes of insight — the insight of an artist. . . . They’d look for soccer fields and that would be the sign of a Soviet military camp, whereas a baseball diamond would be sign of a Cuban military camp. It’s more than just measuring missiles. It’s having an insight into the cultures of these countries.”

On Monday, Brugioni and DiRenzo met with hundreds of their modern-day counterparts at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which bestowed the men with plaques thanking them for helping to “counteract a formidable threat to our country.” Brugioni, speaking to a spellbound audience of analysts, emphasized the humanity at the core of their work. They are watching — godlike, from high above and far away — over volatile and uncertain terrain, with lives at stake.

“I kept after the people yesterday, saying, ‘Don’t forget the troops,’ ” Brugioni says. “Every time you’re looking at that photography, ask, ‘Am I seeing something that can help the troops?’ . . . When we were working [in the ’60s], we never thought that today we could just get Google maps and look down at some of the most highly classified plants in Russia or China. It’s amazing. . . . [Analysts] go into a palace where they have all this kind of equipment and all this sophistication, and I had been there before, and I’m always concerned. . . . If there’s troops there, be concerned about them.”

The plaque sits in a box on a coffee table in the next room, near a copy of the cushioned oak rocking chair Kennedy kept in the Oval Office. Thursday night and Sunday at noon, Brugioni appears in a documentary about the crisis airing on the Military Channel. On Friday evening, at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, he will give a lecture on photography’s role in the half-century-old nuclear crisis, even as the planet chatters about a new potential crisis between Iran and Israel.

“We had said we were going to the brink,” Brugioni says of 50-year-old lessons. “That was a policy. Brinksmanship.”

He pauses.

“And we got to the brink, and we didn’t know what the hell to do.”

Outside his kitchen window, the leaves are turning. Washington is again debating the merits of the Redskins, who have swung this season between disappointment and triumph.

Everything man does on the face of the Earth creates a pattern, as Brugioni says.

In his living room sits a black-and-white photo of Dino and Theresa’s wedding. They were married 55 years and had two children, who between them had six of their own. One of Brugioni’s grandsons is an Army surgeon stationed at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. He’s expected to deploy to Afghanistan next year.

Why young people are setting time aside for faith By Adam Greenwald and Geoffrey Nelson-Blake, Published: October 12 For those of us who came of age in the past decade, two forces have us racing to keep up: First, we are immersed in a 24-hour cycle of news and information with a constant flow of tweets and text messages, cellphones clutched tightly in our hands like Linus’s blanket. And second, we’re starting our adult lives in a world without enough decent-paying jobs, where we might become the first generation in memory to have less opportunity than our parents.

So it’s no wonder that many people our age struggle with the depression, anxiety and disconnection that come with living at a breakneck pace. As a 28-year-old Conservative rabbi and a 30-year-old Seventh-day Adventist minister, we’ve found that many are coping, at least in part, by turning to a rather old-fashioned prescription — religion and, in particular, observance of the Sabbath.

That may sound surprising. After all, sociologists and pollsters often find that, compared with previous generations, young people today are turning away from religious observance. Just this past week, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that rates of religious affiliation in the United States are falling; among those of us under 30, nearly one-third answer “none” when asked about our religion.

As a Seventh-day Adventist and a Jew, we find that the Sabbath brings spiritual discipline to our lives. Each week is punctuated by a day of conscious abstaining from the distracting, the noisy and the ordinary. Instead, we carve out time to focus on family, community, relaxation and reflection. For at least one-seventh of our lives, we put away our wallets, park our cars, shut down our digital devices and try our best to live like we already have everything we need to be happy and fulfilled.

An insistence on creating sacred time and space is one of the key components of nearly all faiths. Traditional Jews and many Christian denominations observe one day a week of sanctified rest. Muslims around the world pause five times a day to bow in prayer. Many religions derived from Eastern traditions include a daily meditative practice. While many Americans feel distant from religion, establishing fixed times for personal renewal has universal appeal.

In spiritual communities across the country — from Jewish worship groups such as Washington’s DC Minyan and Los Angeles’s IKAR to churches too numerous to count — young people come together each week to collectively “power down” from the busy world. The ancient act of gathering in a house of worship on the Sabbath now carries a distinctly countercultural tone: It’s a declaration of independence from the iPhone, a defiant assertion that an e-mail can be left unanswered for a day without causing disaster, a formal protest against the social media machine. It’s a quiet revolution but one of enormous power.

As the executive director of the nation’s largest program for those who want to convert to Judaism, one of us deals daily with individuals and couples, most in their 20s and 30s, who are actively choosing to join a religious community or recommit themselves to living a Jewish life. In countless conversations, nearly every one of the new Jews says that the yearning for a ritual break in life’s commotion is one of the main reasons they’ve decided to convert. Perhaps that is what Ahad Ha-Am, a 20th-century Jewish philosopher, meant when he wrote: “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.”

One woman in her early 30s, who formally converted to Judaism this past week, wrote in a conversion essay: “On Shabbat we are encouraged to live it up, to surround ourselves with friends and family, laugh, tell stories and go to bed knowing that we have a whole morning and afternoon ahead of us to spend however we like. We sing, raise a glass and toast life, then go make crazy, passionate love to our partner. I beg my not-quite-convinced friends to tell me which life, secular or religious, sounds more restrictive?”

Similarly, as a Seventh-day Adventist minister, one of us knows that among the greatest appeals of that faith community is its serious observance of the Sabbath. For Seventh-day Adventists, the Sabbath is at the center of religious life. Potlucks and outdoor activities often follow Saturday morning worship services. In addition to abstaining from work and shopping, for 24 hours Adventists focus on community and rest. In our overloaded society, it cannot be a coincidence that Seventh-day Adventism is the nation’s fastest-growing Christian denomination. Adventists have found wholeness and holiness by closely adhering to a seventh-day Sabbath. It’s this weekly time together, set apart from the hurry of the week, that deepens their relationships, strengthens the fabric of their community and helps restore hope and joy to their lives.

We’ve also witnessed a more subtle embrace of Sabbath values — such as slowing down and eschewing technology — in secular culture. For example, the movement toward “slow food” and community gardens directly clashes with and helps free us from our addiction to fast food and our YouTube-driven attention spans. Recently, in America’s traffic capital, Los Angeles, more than 100,000 pedestrians, cyclists and skateboarders filled empty downtown streets for CicLAvia, a celebration of all things human-powered.

And last spring, a National Day of Unplugging sponsored by Reboot, a nontraditional group of Jewish thought leaders, inspired a range of figures such as Jimmy Fallon and the wife of a former British prime minister to pledge to spend a day consciously avoiding technology and commerce — and instead refocusing on life’s simpler joys.

In place of anxiety about the scarcity of time, energy and resources, and instead of judging our personal connections by counting our Twitter followers or Facebook friends, faith gives us space to spend time with community members and loved ones. In place of the constant barrage of information and responsibilities, the Sabbath gives us room to breathe.

While the statistics paint a picture of waning affiliation and spiritual apathy, our view from the front lines is different. As leaders working with young people from many faiths, we are witnessing the beginnings of a religious renaissance through an embrace of the Sabbath. And for a stressed-out, anxious generation seeking strength and solace, it’s just in time.

[email protected]

[email protected]

Adam Greenwald, a Conservative rabbi, is the executive director of the Miller Introduction to Judaism Program at American Jewish University. Geoffrey Nelson-Blake, a pastor in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, is a community organizer with the San Francisco Organizing Project.

Talia, 7, and Frank Firetti say a prayer before a meal at a fast food restaurant. The father and daughter dine out together every Thursday night and go to church most Sundays. Frank always keeps a Bible on his coffee table at home and in his car, and he likes to read and annotate the book when his faith needs restoration.

Picture by Bonnie Jo Mount / The Washington Post

"Life of a salesman: Selling success, when the American dream is downsized" Washington Post 10/7/12

With shelters full, homeless families have nowhere to goBy Annie Gowen, Published: October 7When Janice Coe, a homeless advocate in Loudoun County, learned through her prayer group that a young woman was sleeping in the New Carrollton Metro station with a toddler and a 2-month-old, she sprang into action.

Coe contacted the young woman and arranged for her to take the train to Virginia, where she put the little family up in a Comfort Suites hotel. Then Coe began calling shelters to see who could take them.

Despite several phone calls, she came up empty. Coe was shocked to learn that many of the local shelters that cater to families were full, including Good Shepherd Alliance, where Coe was once director of social services.

“I don’t know why nobody will take this girl in,” Coe said. “The baby still had a hospital bracelet on her wrist.”

In a region with seven of the 10 most affluent counties in the country, family homelessness is on the rise — straining services, filling shelters and forcing parents and their children to sleep in cars, parks, and bus and train stations. One mother recently bought $14 bus tickets to and from New York so she and her 2-year-old son would have a safe place to sleep — on the bus.

As cold weather descends on the region, the need will become increasingly acute, advocates say. That will be especially true in the District, where continued fallout from the recession and lack of affordable housing has contributed to an 18 percent increase in family homelessness this year over last.

The city has recently come under fire for turning away families seeking help as 118 overflow beds that were added last winter at D.C. General — the city’s main family homeless shelter — sit empty. A few places have recently opened up, but 500 families — some of whom are living with relatives or friends — are on a waiting list for housing.

“We’re hoping we can keep pace with those in the more dire situations,” said David A. Berns, director of the city’s Department of Human Services.

Berns said the city is trying to keep the overflow beds open for hypothermia season, which begins Nov. 1. The city is mandated by law to shelter its residents if the temperature falls below freezing. The agency does not have the money to operate the extra beds, Berns said.

D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who has been critical of the agency’s handling of the crisis, wonders why families are being denied help when the District has a $140 million budget surplus.

“Never did I imagine that beds would be kept vacant,” Graham said. “It’s very upsetting.”

Family homelessness around the Washington region has increased 23 percent since the recession began — though the total number of homeless people stayed fairly steady at around 11,800, according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, which did its annual “point-in-time” survey of the homeless in January. This included some 3,388 homeless children, the study showed.

“These families are the most desperate because they have young children and have nowhere to go,” said Nassim Moshiree, a lawyer for the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

Moshiree spent a good part of the day Friday trying to help a homeless mother of three who Thursday night slept with her children on the steps of a church in Northeast after unsuccessfully asking the city for help. After Moshiree intervened, the city found space for them late Friday.

“It’s a complete abomination,” said Antonia Fasanelli, executive director for the Homeless Persons Representation Project, a Maryland legal services and advocacy group based in Baltimore. She noted that in Baltimore — where homeless families from D.C. sometimes end up — three family shelters have been closed in the past five years, for a loss of about 100 shelter beds. “There is just not enough space.”

Throughout Maryland, Fasanelli said, 38 percent of homeless families are living on the streets. That’s the seventh-highest rate of unsheltered families in the country, according to a Department of Housing and Urban Development study on the homeless released in December.

At the Comfort Suites off Route 7 on Thursday, Helen Newsome, 25, fed her 2-year-old son, Cameron, an orange from the breakfast buffet as her infant daughter Isabella slept on the bed beside her.

Newsome said she became homeless this summer after she was evicted from her apartment in Prince George’s County. Since then, she and her children have slept most nights on a bench or the hard tile floor at the New Carrollton Metro, she said. Although she called several area shelters before she was evicted, she said she could never find one with room.

“I’m not asking for a whole room for myself, as long as I have someplace to sleep, somewhere soft,” Newsome said.

On Thursday, Coe took Newsome to the Loudoun County Department of Family Services, where a social worker helped her sign up for food stamps and other aid and said she would try and help her find a subsidized apartment. Finally, Newsome said she could see an end to her ordeal.

“They’re leaning on me,” she said, gesturing to her kids. “I’m their only hope. It’s okay. Everybody goes through something, some people worse than others.”